The emotional components of rejection sensitivity as a mediator between Borderline Personality Disorder and biased appraisal of trust in faces

Objective: Starting from discordant results in the literature, our contribution aims at clarifying the mediating role of rejection sensitivity (RS) in the untrustworthiness bias in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Method: To do so, we examine whether BPD traits are connected to an untrustworthiness bias toward neutral male and female faces in a non clinical sample of young female college students (N = 110). Unlike previous research, we examine the potential role of the different components of RS (emotional and cognitive) separately, and we consider the anger dimension as potentially relevant for trust ratings. Results: Our results demonstrated that only the emotional components (anxiety and anger) and not the cognitive (expectation) mediated the association between BPD traits and trust ratings. Conclusions: We discussed the importance of considering all three components of RS for a better understanding of the relation between BPD and trust appraisal